Last June’s Euro 2012 was marked by Spain’s historic victory (the third in a row after the World Cup 2010 & Euro 2008) on the playing field, and on the digital field by another breakthrough : the amazing rise of mobile usage during the competition,this mobile infographic below highlights.

The audience has been going mobile over the last few years, that’s a fact lots of reports can tell, and Sports channels publishers in Europe have done well. Barely noticed in 2008, Mobile traffic accounted during the Euro 2012 for over 20% of digital traffic during the competition, it only represented 5,8% last year (close to the 7% of this Comscore study in US in 2011).Mobile traffic has been multiplied by 3 since summer 2011 in the sports sites we studied, with a trend exceeding 2012 global previsions. This mobile growth has been dragged by mobile apps ( Android Apps: +594% growth ; iPhone Apps: + 548% growth), which are strategic to mobile publishers since mobile users viewed, in average, more pages on mobile apps (6,9) than on mobile sites (4,5). The native apps vs mobile web debate is far from being over. This audience going mobile can have a very positive impact on its monetization, more over if all mobile ad capabilities are used. We are not at this stage yet, 80% of the delivered mobile banners during the competition were still standard banners, and only 20% for mobile advanced ad formats, with highest CTR ( average 5,6%)

This mobile infographic is worth reading also for the national differences in mobile traffic it emphazises.

As expected, mobile traffic would peak when their national teams played. As expected, the interest in the rest of the competition was lower after a national team was defeated (France, Poland). Unexpectedly, the mobile traffic has been going down during the competition, after their 1st game (draw 1-1 against Italy) or the interest in the competition didn’t change that much after an elimination (Germany, England).

About the methodology used :

This data was taken from several dozens of leading publishers on Football & Sports sites in 7 Western Europe countries , such as Bild Sport, L’Equipe, Marca, El Mundo Deportivo, Eurosport, MobilesRepublic, App Ran Mobile, RMC Sport, Sport1…all being ad served by Smart AdServer.

All data comparison made in this infographic was made on the same perimeter basis, matching all required criteria needed for ads. Therefore, Overtime comparison were studied on the same sample of European publishers sites, digital share & traffic share among publishers with a platform on each of these supports.